MARIA MAKES a maccheroni frittata. I set the table. Papa sits down stiffly on the edge of a chair. His hands are on his knees. This way they can keep still. He’s leaning over his legs a little. Teardrops break away from his nose and drop straight to the floor. Maria turns the frittata out onto his plate directly from the skillet, saying, “It’s ready.” Papa moves his chair in and quietly eats his whole portion. Maria sees the empty plate and fills it again without asking him. He finishes it. The more he chews the more the muscles in his face, his eyes, and his brow start to move again. Maria says that the shopkeepers raise their prices at Christmas and take advantage of people who want to make a good impression once a year. “We have to do the shopping in mid-August.” The only thing Papa pays attention to is his plate. He cleans it with a piece of bread. Then he stands up and says he’s got to go to the porters’ cooperative to start working again. He tells me to buy a flask of wine, leaves me three hundred liras. Maria clears the table, washes up, puts things away. Maria does things quietly, proving that she knows how to run a kitchen and that even with a sad life you have to keep busy. At least that way there’s no dirt, which would be one more offense. Instead everything’s in order, even with tears in your eyes.
THE AFTERNOON is free. I tell Maria that we should go to Mergellina, where there’s a pier that stretches into the sea. At its far end is a lighthouse and a reef, where you can be outdoors without the city around you. I want to go there because the houses, the streets, everything stops, and suddenly Naples is gone. The open sea and the crashing of the waves conceal it. All you have to do is walk down the pier. Maria puts on her coat. Her scarf is already hanging on the door. Her readiness soothes my bones. On the promenade I buy her a pork-fat-and-pepper tarallo. The wind carries away our warmth. We get it back by walking quickly. Not many people dare to take the walk. American soldiers in rubber shoes hurry by. The aircraft carrier in the bay is the only ship that doesn’t move on the choppy sea spiked with whitecaps. Maria looks at the American soldiers and says, “They’re a beautiful race but they’re always running, running for nothing, for no reason. We Neapolitans have to be thrown out of our homes by an earthquake before we start running.” Maria, why don’t we run, too? “Noooo,” she says, and with her arm she pulls me back into step with her.
AT THE Mergellina pier the riggings on the sailing ships are whistling. The dogs are scared. They hide under the fishermen’s boats in dry dock. The two of us are the only ones to go out on the pier that juts into the middle of the dark sea. The boulders of the breakwater throw water in the air, the waves crash, stop short, and split apart by the bucketful. The boomerang underneath my jacket trembles in the forceful air, pressing its electricity against me. I’d like to throw it against the sea, the north wind, the aircraft carrier, and everything that moves, but not at my mother, no, she can no longer move. Stand still, all of you, stop in your tracks for a minute: if only I had a sliver of voice in my throat to make myself heard, a voice that the wind could spread over the city and make it stand still for a minute. Maria holds my arm tight. I don’t slip away from her, don’t remove the knot of my fist from the handle of the boomerang. At the end of the pier the lighthouse is the farthest point from the city, which seems to have come to a stop. I’m pleased to see it quiet for a minute. A few lights flicker from the island across the bay, from the towns on the coast. Naples’s shoulders are protected from the wind and you can’t hear a thing. I swallow big gulps of sea air. Maria says, “Let’s go back.”
35
PAPA RETURNS home for supper. He sees the wine and before pouring himself some to drink he tries to explain, in Italian, “As long as she was alive I guarded her life, I snatched her away from death day and night.” He drinks it down and says sharply, “Mò nun pozzo fa’ niente cchiù.” Now there’s nothing more I can do. Maria nods her head. I’m just happy that he’s searching for peace. He stayed with Mama till her last breath, and didn’t want to go one step farther, not even to the cemetery. He pours himself another glass, asks if we’re drinking, too. Maria says yes, I say no. She sips a couple of drops from the glass to taste it. Papa tells her, “That’s not a sip, it’s a breath. You’re teasing the wine that way.” Maria makes up for it by draining the glass with a flick of her wrist. We eat slowly, you can hear noises from the other homes. Papa drinks, passes his hand over his face, rubs his forehead. “Thanks for the supper.” He gets up, says good night. In bed we lie close to each other but don’t embrace. She says that her blood is running but it’s not a cut, it’s a change that women go through. She drank the wine to get her blood back. Before falling asleep, she says the precious words, “I care for you.” As usual I don’t know what to say in return.
MASTER ERRICO and Rafaniello said good-bye to each other when I wasn’t there. It’s the last day of the year. Tomorrow’s a holiday, so today we have to work hard. We put all of the rough wood for the upcoming jobs through the planer. We make a lot of noise but today the neighborhood doesn’t pay us any mind. No one sticks their head into the shop to ask Master Errico if he can keep it down, if he can do it later, because someone in the house that night didn’t get any sleep, “nun ha potuto azzecca’ uocchio.” In an alley you try to run the machines at a time that doesn’t disturb anyone. Today everyone’s busy getting ready for the holiday so they don’t mind the screeching of the blades that shave millimeters off the boards and splinter them into sawdust. Master Errico double-checks the squaring, corrects it, divides the finished boards by their grain. He grumbles about the lumberjack, who didn’t cut the lumber during the right phase of the moon and now the wood is weak and bleeding resin. Master Errico tells me that Rafaniello is leaving, he got himself a ticket to sail to the Holy Land because he’s a worshiper of Jerusalem. People don’t get their shoes fixed in Montedidio anymore, he says, nowadays they buy them new or they’re given to them by the mayor at election time, one before and one after the vote. I forget everything, think of work, and bury myself in sawdust. The boomerang is on my chest, beating against my heart. We don’t even stop for lunch. We stop at four o’clock, when evening has already fallen. We wish each other a Happy New Year. Master Errico gives me double pay. “You earned it, kid, be well.” Do you shoot a gun at midnight? I ask him. No, he says. He stands on the balcony, smokes a Tuscan cigar, and watches other people’s fireworks. He likes the Roman candles. “Don Ciccio sets off the best Roman candles in Montedidio.”
I SHAKE the sawdust off my clothes, beating myself like a rug. The boomerang bumps against my ribs and rustles like the wings beneath Rafaniello’s jacket. I think of him. Tonight the flight of the boomerang will accompany him. At home my writing reaches the end of the scroll. A few more turns and nothing more will be left. I have to hold the scroll open, since the written part pulls it closed. I sharpen my pencil and wait for Maria, who’s gone out. She comes back out of breath. She went up to her place to clean up and to get a change of clothes. The landlord was waiting for her at the door and threw himself on her right in the middle of the staircase. She didn’t shout. She kicked him in the shins and got away. “If you had been there you would have thrown him down the stairs,” she says. She’s agitated, frightened. He was holding her tight with his hands and his breath stank. He’s out of his mind, but she defended herself. My thoughts become dark, my nerves frayed, wound tight from the boomerang. They want to shove and slap everyone in sight. Maria, nun succere n’ata vota. It won’t happen again. These grim words come out in my Neapolitan voice. I show my ugly side. It’s the first time, so I don’t know what kind of a face I’ve just made, because Maria takes it in her hands and says, “Don’t act like that. Forget about it. It’s over already. It was nothing, I shouldn’t even have told you.” She looks for my eyes and I don’t know where I put them because she tells me, “Look at me, look me in the face,” and moves my face until I let go of the dark thoughts, look at her, take her wrists, and give myself two slaps in the face with them, clenching my teeth. She gets scared and hugs me and now yes, now it’s all over.